I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs.

My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation.

As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

It is all very well, in these changing times, to adapt one's work to take in duties not traditionally within one's realm; but bantering is of another dimension altogether. For one thing, how would one know for sure that at any given moment a response of the bantering sort is truly what is expected? One need hardly dwell on the catastrophic possibility of uttering a bantering remark only to discover it wholly inappropriate.

So why not become a mongrel? It's healthy

Every country should have a strong literary tradition of its own at the center, but it should also have an interest in other countries.

There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.